


Hanging By A Spider's Thread

by von_gelmini



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Armchair Therapy, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Manipulation, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Peter Parker Has Issues, Recovery, Suicide Attempt, Tony Stark Has Issues, Trust Issues, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 11:37:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20814515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/von_gelmini/pseuds/von_gelmini
Summary: One of these days soon I'll finish something that doesn't well up from whereverthefuck this stuff comes from.There's a suicide attempt and the immediate fall out in chapters 3 & 4. 5-10 are recovering from that attempt and the emotional damage that they both have.I know it's unusual for me, but other than the miserable failure that happens in chapter 1, I didn't bring the sex. Just the angst.But yes, there is a happy ending. Other than one time, there has always been a happy ending to everything I write. It's in my life contract. No unhappy endings.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One of these days soon I'll finish something that doesn't well up from whereverthefuck this stuff comes from.
> 
> There's a suicide attempt and the immediate fall out in chapters 3 & 4. 5-10 are recovering from that attempt and the emotional damage that they both have.
> 
> I know it's unusual for me, but other than the miserable failure that happens in chapter 1, I didn't bring the sex. Just the angst.
> 
> But yes, there is a happy ending. Other than one time, there has always been a happy ending to everything I write. It's in my life contract. No unhappy endings.

It was hard to say exactly how it happened. They were standing too close. But they’d stood too close before. Tony touched Peter on the small of his back. But Tony’d touched Peter on the small of his back before. Peter stood suddenly and that pressed his back against Tony’s chest. But yes, they’d done that before as well. There was no one thing different about this day than any other. But when Peter turned around, their lips were only inches apart. Tony’s breath was warm and moist against Peter’s face. His eyes were dark with desire. Peter gasped softly, lips parted, eyes half closed, body tense. Until he felt Tony’s lips on his. Then his body wasn’t tense, it yielded. His knees threatened to buckle and Peter fell back toward the table. Tony’s arm slipped around his waist, catching him, pulling them close, the length of their bodies touching. The heat and rise between their legs pressing against each other. 

Months of denied longing fell away. Peter wrapped his arms around Tony’s neck, pulled him in and took over the kiss. Hot and frantic, deep and desperate. He plundered Tony’s mouth and grabbed at him. His hands wandered, pulling at Tony’s clothes, seeking the skin beneath them. He rucked up Tony’s shirt and his hands found what they were looking for, warm skin stretched over firm muscles. His fingers clutched and dug in, pulling Tony so close, wanting him even closer, being inside his skin wouldn’t be close enough. 

Tony recovered from the boy’s need and returned it with his own. His kiss was fierce, demanding, hard. His hand tangled in Peter’s hair and tugged but not away, closer, deepening their kiss. “Bed,” Tony gasped into Peter’s mouth. “Now.” 

Reluctantly they separated their bodies, yet still touching as they went up the stairs. A hand on the back, one on the shoulder, fingers cupping around a firm ass, hands seeking out the other’s hands. At the landing Peter brought them together for another kiss. They walked down the hall, still clutching, still kissing. Taking a few steps and then kissing again. Peter tugged at the hem of Tony’s t-shirt, raising it until he had to move away to lift it over the man’s head. It was dropped in the hallway. He fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. Tony fumbled at the buttons Peter missed. Some may have popped, neither of them knew, only that Peter’s shirt joined Tony’s on the floor a few feet closer to the bedroom door. Still kissing, still grabbing at each other with one hand, their other hands reached for the fastening of their pants. Buttons and snaps were undone as they walked, connected at the lips, at the hips. Zippers were tugged down as they went through the doorway. By the time they made it to the bed, pants were being pushed down to the floor where they tangled with ankles as shoes were toed off, the bundle of them kicked away until they fell onto the bed, both naked.

“You want this, kid?” Tony asked against Peter’s lips. 

Peter ground himself against Tony. His hard cock met Tony’s which was in the same state. “Yes,” he whispered back. He put Tony’s hand on his waist and held it there as he turned onto his stomach. He lifted his hips until his cock was settled against the bed and he was rutting into the mattress, his ass squirming with empty need. “Fuck me Mister Stark,” Peter moaned into the pillow.

Tony reached for the lube, coated his fingers and slid them between Peter’s cheeks, moaning as his fingers brushed across his hole. “Not as long as you call me that.”

“Fuck me Anthony.” 

The air was forced out of Tony’s lungs by the strength of his reaction to his name on the boy’s lips. He could almost feel his blood rush south as his cock seemed to grow impossibly hard, throbbing against the boy’s thigh. He massaged Peter’s opening with his fingertip. “What do you want,” he said softly against Peter’s ear.

“You to fuck me Anthony.”

“I know that but how.” 

“With your cock. Not your finger.”

“Petey, have you ever…”

“No. Doesn’t matter. Just fuck me.” 

“Baby, I need to get you ready.”

“I’m ready, Anthony. I need you.”

Every time the boy said his name, an uncontrolled groan escaped him. He didn’t understand why. He had no reference point. “Petey are you sure you want…”

“I want you to fuck me Anthony, not talk to me,” Peter said frustratedly into the pillow in which he was hiding his face. “Now. Please. I need you,” he whimpered.

Peter’s demanding avoidance slowed Tony down. “Sweetheart, we should talk about this first. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t want to talk. I need you inside me.” Peter twisted his hips to rub his ass against Tony’s erection. He kept his face hidden by the pillow.

“Look at me baby.” Tony couldn’t help rutting against Peter. He kissed the boy’s shoulder, open mouthed, breathing moist warmth over the boy’s skin, licking at the gooseflesh his breath raised.

“Unh unh.” Peter shook his head. He moaned soft and low and desperately. “Anthony…” He stretched the name out impossibly long. “Want you on top of me. Wanna feel you.”

Even though he knew he shouldn’t, that he should press the reason for Peter’s reluctance to talk about what they were about to do, he wanted nothing more than to feel Peter’s body beneath him, to cover him with his, to feel the boy’s fevered back against his chest. He could do that without entering him. Lay on top of Peter and whisper what needed to be said against the back of the boy’s neck.

Peter moaned loudly as he felt the weight of Tony’s body pressing him into the mattress. He felt the firmness of his muscles, the broadness of his chest, the cool metal of the arc reactor between his shoulder blades. And the hardness pressed along the crack of his ass. He raised his hips to press against Tony’s cock, tensing his legs, clenching and releasing the muscles of his ass, grinding against the sheets, squirming rhythmically. “Please fuck me Anthony,” he whimpered, never taking his face out of hiding. 

“I need to prep you baby.”

“No you don’t.”

Tony puzzled over that. “Have you used toys before Petey?”

Peter groaned in frustration. “Yes. Please fuck me Anthony,” he whimpered again.

“Peter, look at me.”

“God Tony, just fuck me!” Peter said with irritation.

The change in name made Tony balance his weight to his knees and elbows. He raised himself off of Peter’s back, hovering above him. “No.” 

“No?” Peter said in angry shock.

“No Peter. Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

“I want you to fuck me, that’s what’s going on.”

“I’m not going to.” 

Peter pushed up from the mattress, shoving Tony off of him, using as much of his superior strength as it took to accomplish that. He stood and looked down at Tony who was on the bed. “No?” he asked again more plainly.

“No,” Tony replied, rolling until he was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at Peter. His erection was going down but Peter’s was not.

“Fine!” Peter grabbed the bundle of his pants and shoes. He held them as he walked out the door. 

Tony scrambled after him, watching as Peter picked up his shirt in the hallway. “Peter!” 

Peter said nothing in return but went into the guest bathroom and slammed the door behind him, locking it. 

When the boy emerged fully clothed, Tony was standing by the door, still naked, his cock entirely soft. He reached out and grabbed him by the arm. “Peter stop this.”

Peter shook off Tony’s hold and started for the elevator. “Why? You said no. You’re not going to fuck me.” 

The elevator arrived, Peter got into it, and Tony was left gaping, not entirely sure what happened.

Tony wanted to dress and go after Peter. Wanted to call him. At least wanted to text him. He didn’t. He figured the boy needed the night to cool down from whatever was bothering him enough to walk out in the middle of what was going to be their first sex together. 

He knew it had something to do with talking about it instead of just doing it. But what Peter was demanding Tony wasn’t sure he could, or wanted to, give. Not that he didn’t want Peter. Not that he hadn’t drempt of, and jerked off to, what happened in the workshop happening. Passionate desperate desire of the exact sort they’d been having. Wanting each other so much that they couldn’t part, that clothes went flying, that they ended up in Tony’s bed. But it was there that his and Peter’s wants separated. It seemed that Peter only wanted what would be equivalent to a quick, anonymous fuck. And Tony wanted so, so much more. He’d fallen deeply in love with the boy. 

Tony thought he was finally getting what he’d wanted — Peter in his bed, in his life. Only to be walked out on. He went back into his bedroom, stared at the bed with its rumpled sheets, the stain of lube on them where Peter had been lying, the damp spot from his moist hot breaths darkening the middle of the indentation on his pillow where Peter’s head had rested and his face had been buried. He walked past it and into his dressing room, pulled on a pair of sleep pants and a t-shirt, went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa. Staring out into the room emphasised how empty it was. He rolled over to face the sofa back instead and tried to pretend that what happened hadn’t hurt. Even though it was still the middle of the evening, he fell asleep. When he woke in the morning his armor was put back on — not his suit, his armor — and he went about his day.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony waited until an hour after Peter was supposed to arrive to help him in the workshop before texting.

_ Peter we need to talk _

There was no reply. Not even a ‘read’ notice.

_ I’m sorry. Please talk to me _

He waited for five minutes before sending another text. 

_ About anything _

_ Are you coming over today? _

_ Peter we NEED to talk _

_ I need to talk _

That one had been hard to send. It was the wrong side of showing vulnerability. It wasn’t replied to or read. Tony sat on the sofa for an hour. 

_ Please talk to me Peter _

Tony’s hands were shaking as he typed. He sat there, staring at his phone until he noticed that it was dark outside. He wasn’t hungry so he didn’t eat. 

_ I’m sorry _

He rolled over to sleep on the sofa. It was a remarkably comfortable sofa.

The cleaning lady came in two days later and headed for the bedroom after she’d finished cleaning around Tony’s mess of puttering on the coffee table. Tony ran after her, around her, ahead of her, and shut his bedroom door. “This room is fine.” 

He knew he was being ridiculous and overreacting. He desperately wanted to text Peter again. To call him. To get in one of his stupidly expensive cars, drive over to May’s apartment, and demand to talk to Peter. Which would’ve gone over  _ great _ when May realized that Peter’s mentor, a man more than twice his age, had attempted to have sex with her nephew. 

_ Peter we don’t have to talk about it. I won’t bring it up again. I won’t touch you again. I’m sorry I made you feel uncomfortable. Will you be returning to your internship? You don’t have to give it up because I made a mistake _

He paused. 

_ If you don’t want to, I’ll still sign the papers for the lab course credit you were getting _

He waited a few minutes to see if his texts would be read. They weren’t. Tony lost track of how long he stared at his phone before texting again. 

_ I’m sorry Peter. I can’t give you what you want _

The next day, Tony waited until Peter would be home from his last class. He waited more. Enough time after that to allow for the possibility that he was hanging out with his college friends. 

_ Peter avoiding me like this is being childish. We don’t have to discuss what happened but I need to know if you’ll be returning to work _

His text bounced back immediately as undeliverable. The number had been disconnected.

He thought he was the most avoidant person in the galaxy. Clearly he was outdone by a nineteen year old.

“FRIDAY, pull the activity data for the last week from Karen.”

“Yes boss.” FRIDAY paused. Her processing speed was lightning fast. She never needed to  _ pause _ . “Before Karen will release the data to me, she has a message. She wants me to inform you that your request is a gross violation of Mister Parker’s privacy. Data is being released now and the file is on your screen. It is encrypted and Mister Parker will be notified when you break the encryption. It is a simple algorithm. I have plotted the solution. It is in a document below the file.”

Tony collapsed into the nearest kitchen counter stool, gasping for breath.

“Shall I decrypt the file boss?”

“Delete file and encryption key. Thank you FRIDAY. Inform Karen that…” Tony steadied his breathing. “She is to send no data to the servers except in case of emergency or risk of life. Unless Peter wishes the data released.”

When the cleaning lady next showed up Tony instructed her to clean his bedroom and change the linens, disposing of the ones she stripped from the bed. Life moved on.

Tony tried to avoid running across any mention of Spider-Man’s latest activity. It did still scroll across his news feed occasionally but he never clicked on the articles, only read the unavoidable headlines.

It would be easy for him to force the issue. He had the most advanced AI at his service. If he wanted to know Peter’s new phone number, he could. He could access the computers at Columbia to find out his grades, class schedule, and attendance records. He could easily hack around Peter’s notification system in Karen. He’d built the damn thing. He could’ve even deactivated Peter’s suit entirely, leaving it, and any previous ones he’d kept, completely dead. He didn’t do any of those things. 

Peter’s certainly wasn’t the first betrayal he’d had. Probably, most assuredly, wouldn't be the last. It was a constant in his life. There were demands on him. Tech to build for the Avengers. Missions that needed Iron Man’s attention. Meetings at Stark Industries that couldn’t be avoided. Updates, new devices, and new projects that the company were needed for SI to continue functioning. He was well practiced in throwing on another layer of armor and getting on with doing what everyone else needed of him.

“Boss? Karen has informed me that there is a malfunction in one of her subroutines that Mister Parker has been unable to repair. She would like it if you could repair the damage.”

“ _ She _ would like?”

“Yes boss. The request was an automatic response built into her system that was designed to notify you in case of malfunction.”

“Ah. So Peter didn’t request it.”

“No boss.”

“Send the problem to my workstation. I’ll get to it this afternoon. Inform her that it will be done as soon as I finish rerouting these circuits. That shouldn’t take me more than an hour or two. Let me know if it’s needed before then.” 

“She says that the repair will not be needed before nine o’clock tonight.”

Tony snorted. “Far be it from me having anything in my life that will keep Spider-Man from his fucking patrols.” It had been over three months since the last time he saw Peter. After he fixed Karen’s subroutine there were no more repair or update requests. Tony assumed that Peter had hacked the automatic notification function and was handling the suit’s, and Karen’s, repairs on his own.

After dealing with Tony's irritable moods, Pepper insisted that the upcoming gala was one Tony couldn’t avoid. Stark Industries was courting the patron of the charity event for a merger. The face of Stark Industries had to be there. The invitation included a plus one. Which Tony was going to ignore, but Pepper insisted he not. They’d been divorced for a year before the event with Peter. Since the divorce, he’d dodged her previous ham-fisted attempts to set him up with people, but she was using this event as an excuse. She started running through a list of potential people to accompany him but Tony cut her off. He was still capible of finding his own date thankyouverymuch. 

During the previous New York Fashion Week, amongst many of the phone numbers that Happy took from people who tried to hand them to Tony, one was for a handsome model who walked for Valentino and who Tony had spoken to when he placed an order for several suits from the collection. Of course the young man was thrilled to be asked to be Tony’s arm candy for the night. It caused a buzz that Tony’s plus one was another man. It was no secret that he was bisexual, but he’d never publicly dated a man. During the event, Tony was exactly as publicly affectionate as he would’ve been with any woman from his playboy years in the past.

The model was young, handsome, and surprisingly capable of carrying on a social conversation as well as able to handle the mixing and mingling required from a formal event. The next invitation Tony received wasn’t avoided and they began dating. Which, since Tony had never been a ‘take it slow’ kind of guy, included occasional after-date appearances in Tony’s bed. He had no trouble ‘just fucking’ the guy the way Peter had just wanted to be just fucked. 

Eventually their pictures began to make the society and gossip columns. If Tony harbored any hope that Peter might notice one of those pictures and feel perhaps a twinge of regret for leaving him, he kept that hope to himself. The model wasn’t unbearable, so Tony went through the motions of having a non-live-in relationship beyond simply ‘dating’. It saved him from having to find a new piece of arm candy for the events he couldn’t get out of and provided him with a decent enough lay whenever he wanted one.

He knew it was ridiculous for a fifty something year old man to be pining for a kid who very clearly, and very emphatically, dumped him. That didn’t stop him from doing it, anymore than the snap kept him from pining after the kid. It didn’t stop him from remembering the way Peter’s body felt beneath him. It didn’t stop him from aching to feel that again, even a year later.


	3. Chapter 3

The name that accompanied the ring on his phone startled him. “May, what is it you need?” The only calls he received were when people needed something from him.

“Have you seen Peter?” his aunt asked.

“Peter? No. Why would you think I had?”

“I know you two broke up…”

“Broke up? We were never together.”

“Oh please. I know you were. It’s Peter’s life. He’s an adult. It was his decision to date you, so I knew.”

“May, we were never dating. I don’t know why he gave you that impression.”

“It doesn’t matter. Have you seen him lately?”

“No. Why?”

“He hasn’t been home for four days. I called Columbia and he hasn’t been to class in six. MJ and Ned haven’t heard from him. He’s not answering his phone. I was hoping that maybe the two of you got back together and he’s been… busy.”

“I’m sorry May. I haven’t seen or heard from him in ages. Is this something he does often? Go without coming home?”

“No. He may take a night or two where I don’t hear from him, but never this long.” May sounded genuinely worried.

“I… I don’t feel comfortable trying to access his suit. He was very adamant about his privacy after we broke up. I mean after he left. Is his suit with him or still at home?”

“With him. He carries it with him almost all the time. Spider-Man’s been very active lately. It’s had me worried. He hasn’t been spending as much time with his friends.”

“I haven’t been following Spider-Man news.” Tony sighed. “May, we weren’t ever together or dating. We never got a chance to. It fell apart the first time we…” He let it trail off.”

“I knew something had happened. He’s… changed since then. But I’m really worried. He doesn’t stay away like this.”

“You don’t think he could be with a new boyfriend and been, like you said, busy?”

“He doesn’t have boyfriends. Just… he’s never mentioned it, but I assume the overnights are… I don’t ask. He’s not a kid. He can sleep with whoever he wants.” She paused. “There were a lot of them after your break up, now there's hardly been any.”

Tony sucked in his lips and closed his eyes. Knowing that Peter had been dating would’ve been hard enough to take. He had no reason to expect that Peter wouldn’t be.  _ He  _ was after all. But hearing that he’d been randomly sleeping around was a blow.

“Tony, I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t want to have anything to do with Peter anymore, but could you please try to find him?”

“All right,” Tony said, his shoulders slumping. “I’ll call you and let you know if I find anything or not.”

“Thank you.” She paused again. “I was upset when I thought Peter was… with you. You’re so much older than him. But…” She sighed. “I think you’d’ve been the better option.”

He wasn’t surprised by the deep feeling of upset hearing about Peter — not just that he was missing — brought up. He just wished it hadn’t. Wished that a year’s distance would’ve softened the impact by now. “I’ll look into it May,” he said, finally ending the call.

“FRIDAY, find Peter’s suit. Find Karen. Find any trackers he may have on him. Override any security protocols he put on to keep me away. Break the damn encryption. Basically do whatever you have to in order to find Peter’s suit and get me the data from it.” If he gave the order with a lot more anger and urgency in his voice than usual, FRIDAY didn’t have the capability to be hurt by his tone.

“Yes boss.” 

It was a big order. Tony wasn’t surprised that time that she paused. The length of the pause began to worry him. When she didn’t answer for what felt like over a minute, Tony actually started checking his watch. After five, he asked her again. “FRIDAY are you able to establish any contact at all, in any way, with the suit monitors or Karen?”

“Karen is…” FRIDAY actually paused again. Tony was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with her programming. “Fragmented. I’m trying to piece her back together again boss.”

“Put it on the screen.” 

The neural net looked worse than when Ultron took over JARVIS. Huge pieces of Karen’s coding were gone completely. The oldest damage was to the reporting routines that used to send data to the Oracle servers. The deletion was crudely done, presumably by Peter himself. Things had been removed seemingly at random. The communication methods first. Then some of the routines that reported/recorded Peter’s physical conditions, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, and so on. Those things were tied into other routines and breaking those connections took out still other things. That’s the way most of the programming changes were. An attempt to get rid of one thing damaged another unrelated thing, tries to fix that broke something else, and so on, leaving gaps that eventually started having Karen eating in on herself.

“Can you at least piece enough of this together that you can get me a location. Plain old GPS if you have to.” Tony tried to repair some of the code, but it was so scrambled, only FRIDAY could possibly make sense of it. Again he regretted the loss of JARVIS because while FRIDAY was good, JARVIS was better.

“Boss, GPS is showing what looks to be a tracker signature, or at least part of one, on the Columbia campus near 120th and Amsterdam. I can’t pinpoint which building because there seems to be more than one location.”

“Is the location moving?”

“Static boss. No response back. Just a low level transmission that GPS can pick up.”

“All right. Do the typical scans of hospital, EMS, and police records going back six days. Make it eight. Search on name and appearance. Report it to me in the suit.”

Tony tapped the arc reactor and the nanites crawled over his body, encasing it in his Mark 51 suit. He flew low over the engineering and biological science buildings. As he got closer, FRIDAY was finding signals easier. The nanites of the Iron Spider suit were able to be picked up but the energy within them was low. Finally, with enhanced visuals, Tony was able to find small bits of red, dark blue, and gold littered on the roof of the Shapiro Center.

He gathered the pieces and they valiantly tried to link themselves together but were only able to loosely knit a bit here and there, not enough to form a larger, solid piece. Pieces in his hands still weren’t joining even using nanites from his own suit to help them, so he carried the rest in his arms as he continued to search the roof. He found parts of a web shooter and one whole one. In one clump of nanites he found a bit of fingernail and a few drops of blood. What Tony had after finding as many pieces as were on the flat of the roof, wasn’t enough to even remotely account for the entirety of Peter’s suit. What he had was mostly from the arms. There were large parts, the majority of the body, still missing. He flew up and landed on one of the four blocks of cooling fan assemblies. He searched block by block and in the third one, wedged sitting between the body of a fan and the housing that covered it, was Peter’s body. 

He withdrew his helmet and wrapped his suited hand around the boy’s wrist. The arms of the IronSpider had been torn off leaving ragged edges where they joined the main body of the suit. The skin of Peter’s lower arms was cut to shreds with multiple long gashes in various states of healing. He was covered in blood. Peter was pale, but didn’t have a blue/violet death pallor. “FRIDAY, detect life signs,” Tony ordered, panic and fear in his voice.

“Vitals detected but weak. His advanced healing appears to be working. The wounds on his arms are closing. Slower than they should be, given the state of previous observed wounds in my files.”

Tony bent down and tried to lift Peter out of the narrow space he was squeezed into. As he did, a long thin knife, no, a straight razor, clattered to the roof from where it was wedged between Peter’s leg and the wall.

“Fuck Petey. What the hell did you do,” Tony said to himself as he pulled the boy free and gathered him into his arms. The boy was unconscious and would never know. Tony pressed a kiss to his forehead. His healing was working and taking him to a hospital would reveal his identity. It was unlikely that any hospital would know what to do with an Enhanced Individual like Peter anyway. He flew back to the penthouse.

Tony stretched Peter out on his bed. FRIDAY managed to get the suit to release what was left of it, though it didn’t withdraw the way it was supposed to. It hung like clothing on the bed underneath the boy. He pulled it out, leaving Peter nearly naked save for a thong. He took the pillows from the head of the bed and put them under Peter’s legs and ass, raising him into a wedge position so that whatever blood was left in him would flow to his vital organs. He covered Peter with a thick duvet then put two more on top of that, hoping that it would help with shock. Tony sat on the edge of the bed and watched the open gashes, and the scars from those closed and partially closed, slowly try to heal themselves. 

He left for a few moments and came back with a bowl of hot water and a washcloth to begin cleaning the blood off Peter’s arms and body. “Baby, why?” he asked Peter’s unconscious body as he washed it. “Baby,” he choked out as he looked at one of the deepest cuts. He brought a roll of gauze back from the bathroom and wrapped it around Peter’s arm, bringing the edges of the wound closer together to hopefully help the boy’s healing. Tony remembered that he had a suture kit under the cabinet. He unwrapped the bandage and began stitching up Peter’s arm as he tried to keep his tears from getting in it. After the deepest cut was stitched, he did the same for the next deepest, then the next until all the ones that weren’t superficial or either already closing up were roughly stitched by his inexperienced hand. He left the bandages off so he could monitor the rate at which they closed up.

Tony sat there brushing the hair from Peter’s face, running his fingers through it, occasionally putting them on his neck so he could feel the boy’s pulse getting stronger.

He hadn’t called May yet. He knew he should, but he wanted to be the only one there when Peter woke up. It was selfish and wrong but it was something he  _ had _ to do.


	4. Chapter 4

It was almost dawn before the deepest cut had closed enough that the skin knitted back together underneath the sutures. The boy’s pulse was normal, his breathing regular. Tony still sat there, still stroking Peter’s hair, having moved his head into his lap. He watched Peter’s eyes move under his eyelids, felt his body shudder, felt his breaths gasp. At last his eyelashes fluttered open. His gaze was unfocused but tears ran out of the outside corners of his eyes as his ragged voice spoke the word, “No.”

“It’s all right Peter.”

“No it’s not,” he sobbed brokenly. Peter rolled out of Tony’s lap, onto his side, facing away from him. “You weren’t supposed to find me.”

“I know.”

“Why did you?” Peter asked, still crying, still facing away, still curled up on himself. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because,” Tony swallowed hard, “I love you.”

“I don’t love you,” He spat out against his knees, not moving or uncurling.

Tony took a deep, shuddering breath, held it in, his lips bitten shut, before releasing it slowly. “I know.”

“I guess you want to know why,” Peter said angrily. “It wasn’t because of you, don’t flatter yourself.”

“You can tell me or not, whatever you want. I know I have no right to ask.”

“That’s right, you don’t.” 

“I have a phone number. He’s used to working with the Enhanced and with the Avengers.”

“I don’t want your damn phone number.”

“All right. I’m going to call May since you don’t want…” Tony breathed in heavily again. “You can go home with her.”

Peter stayed curled up away from Tony until he heard Tony say his aunt’s name into the phone. He uncurled fast and pushed on Tony’s hand using his superior strength. “No!” The phone went skittering across the room, shattering into pieces. 

Tony opened the nightstand drawer, and took out another phone. “I’m just going to tell her you’re here, you’re alive, and safe. Nothing more.” Peter watched him through narrowed eyes. After he made the call and put the phone away, Peter rolled over again to face away from him, not quite so tightly curled in on himself.

“Are you tired, Peter?” He pushed the top two blankets he’d had covering the boy toward him. The thicker one that had been against Peter’s skin was covered in blood. He stood and put it on the floor. He pulled back the bed covers on his side of the bed and put the pillows back where they belonged. “I’ve been up all night with you.” He stripped down to his boxers then slipped in under the covers. “FRIDAY, lock all exterior doors to the penthouse, the stairs, and the elevator. Alert me if Peter attempts to leave or tries to hurt himself.” He settled into the bed. “Good night Peter.” He rolled over and faced away.

“You can’t keep me here,” Peter said quietly.

“It’s here or May. I thought your breaking my phone was the decision you made. If you wish to change it, I have a few dozen phones scattered around here. I’ll call her for you,” Tony said without turning over.

Peter huffed but didn’t answer. Tony lay still and stared out into the room. At some point he actually fell asleep because he woke needing to use the bathroom and Peter was under the blankets, his head on one of the pillows, softly snoring. He next woke to his phone vibrating.

“Yes May. He’s all right,” Tony said softly. Peter was still sleeping. “He’s asleep. I’ll ask him if he wants to talk to you when he wakes up.”

“ _ If  _ he wants to talk to me?” she asked.

“Um hmm. I can’t say more than that other than he’s alive and safe.”

“Are you two…”

“No. He’s sleeping in my bed, nothing else. I’d rather not wake him. I’ll talk to you later.”

Even though it was late afternoon, Tony went into the kitchen and started making breakfast. When he was finished, he went back into the bedroom. “I know you didn’t sleep through that call. Would you like something to eat?”

Peter got up without answering, went to Tony’s closet, and pulled on a pair of the man’s sweatpants, tying the drawstring tight so they wouldn’t fall down. He looked down at the bloody duvet and the torn remnants of his suit laying on the floor by Tony’s side of the bed. He sighed and then joined Tony at the dining table. They ate in silence. 

Tony watched as Peter ate, looking at his arms as he raised and lowered his fork. “I can take the stitches out after breakfast, unless your body rejects them on its own.”

Peter didn’t answer but when he’d finished eating, he stretched his arms out on the table. Tony went to get the suture kit and carefully removed all the stitches he’d put in yesterday. When he was finished, he cleared the table and washed the dishes. After, he grabbed his StarkPad, sat back down to the table, and began working.

“You don’t have to babysit me. You have FRIDAY doing that already,” Peter said bitterly as he sat on the sofa with the TV remote.

Tony shrugged. “There’s nothing I can’t get done from home today. I hadn’t been planning on going to the office anyway.”

“Well go down to your damn workshop then.” Peter found a TV show on Netflix, put the captions on, and turned the volume down low.

“Not at that stage yet. I need to work on these schematics first.” It was almost midnight when Tony got up and started to cook dinner. They sat down to eat at one in the morning. “I’m going to bed to try to get my sleep schedule back on track. You’re welcome to sleep whenever you want. In my room or the guest room.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Peter said sullenly. “You’re still watching me wherever I go.”

“FRIDAY, do not report Peter’s activity to me unless he attempts to leave or tries to harm himself.” Tony cleared the dinner mess and went into his bedroom. He set out a second set of bathroom things in his bathroom. He lay a pair of pyjamas on the other side of the bed. There were supplies in the guest bathroom, as well as some simple, emergency clothes in varying sizes just in case someone suddenly stayed over without bringing anything. Given the irregularity of all things Avenger, it had happened before. He took one of the pills he’d used during his anxiety phases, and went to sleep.

Peter was asleep on the other side of the bed, in the pyjamas Tony laid out for him, when his phone’s alarm buzzed at nine in the morning. There were messages from May. He had them, and all the others, displayed on a screen in the shower, then on the mirror, while he dressed for another day of work from home. He had FRIDAY relay messages to all the ones he intended to answer. He told May that Peter was still alive and safe and not ready to go home yet. And nothing was happening between them, nor was it going to. 

When Peter woke sometime around noon, Tony was sitting in the living room behind a holotable with DUM-E upstairs, sitting waiting for Tony to ask it for something. U straightening up the living room.

“Why don’t you go downstairs,” Peter asked, irritably.

Tony shrugged. “This works just fine.”

Peter huffed and went to the kitchen to find something to eat. He flopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. “It wasn’t about you,” Peter said after about an hour.

“Um hmm,” was all Tony replied.

“Things are just… shit.”

“It happens.” He put his hand into the light projection glove and tried to move his fingers. They didn’t move right. He grumbled, turned off the projection, and picked up his tablet.

“I just…” Peter sighed. “Doesn’t matter.” He went back to watching the TV while Tony worked on the schematics again. Around six, he set the project down and cooked dinner.

“When did you start cooking,” Peter said. He sounded perpetually irritated and low-key angry at something.

“I’ve always known how to cook. I just don’t do it often. Especially not for myself when I’m alone. It’s easier to call for take-out.”

“Take-out’s fine with me. Probably better than… whatever that is.”

“Salmon with ginger and scallions. I remember when we all ordered from  _ I Fratelli _ you liked the salmon. I got the gnocchi but I like salmon too. It’s really not a complicated dish.”

“God Tony would you just stop.”

“I have to eat. If you want to you can. If you don’t want to you don’t,” he said putting two plates on the table. Peter stayed on the sofa. When Tony was finished eating he cleared both plates, one empty and one full, into the kitchen. U carefully rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher while Tony went back to work.

“Karen got fucked up and the suit started… misbehaving.”

“I know. Unfortunately the neural nets of my AIs are very interconnected. When I did JARVIS for my master’s thesis, I was trying to mimic the brain as closely as possible. That was my thesis premise, and I got into the habit with the subsequent AIs. There are easier ways, but…” Tony shrugged as he adjusted the fingers of the glove image. “Sorry.”

“I had to be the one to call the nanites back into their housing in the web shooters. With my mind.”

Tony nodded. “That’s the way mine works. It’s not pre-programmed like Karen was.”

“Yeah well, it broke the bottom two of my ribs on each side.”

“Sorry about that.” 

Peter watched another episode. “Is the suit okay?”

“Nope. Totally non-functional. Karen’s shattered and most of the nanites are dead.”

“You gonna fix it?”

“No.”

“No?” Peter said with shock. “How am I going to go on patrols?”

“Not my problem.”

“I’ll just use one of my earlier suits.”

“Yeah, about that…”

“What! You… you can’t!”

“Yeah, actually, I can.”

“Open this damn thing.” Peter headed for the elevator. 

“Not going to happen.”

He picked up the heavy glass bowl off the coffee table and threw it at Tony. The man suddenly had an actual suit glove, not the light projection one, over his hand and shattered it with his repulsor.

“This is kidnapping!”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck you,” Peter mumbled without any heat to his voice. He headed down the hall.

When he was finished for the night, Tony was surprised to see Peter asleep, curled up in his bed.


	5. Chapter 5

It went on like that for four days. Long stretches of silence, a lot of TV watching. Sometimes Peter would eat with Tony, other times he’d grab something out of the fridge, done deliberately when Tony had cooked to try to provoke a reaction out of him. Which it didn’t. There were outbursts over inconsequential things. 

“What the fuck do I have to do to get out of here,” Peter said angrily after throwing a small marble Icarus against the glass balcony door. The statue broke, the glass didn’t.

“I just sent four numbers to your phone, pick one.” Tony paused. “Or you can talk to me.” Tony went back to work. Peter fell asleep on the sofa.

Late that night in bed, with Peter facing away from Tony, he said softly. “This last time he broke my nose and orbital socket. I heal. Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does, Peter,” Tony said calmly, from the other side of the bed, facing away, looking into the room. There was a long pause and Tony thought Peter had fallen asleep.

“He was forty seven years old.”

“May said you weren’t dating anyone specific.”

“May doesn’t know my damn life.” Those were the last things they said before falling asleep.

“It’s hard keeping the secret,” Peter said on another day. Statements like that were inching out whenever Peter was relaxed. They were always said in a flat matter-of-fact tone, usually when Tony was occupied or getting ready for sleep.

“You’re an Avenger. There’s no reason to keep the secret unless you want to.”

Peter sighed. “People can get hurt. The rest of you don’t have non… superheroes in your lives.”

“Security can be provided. And isn’t that kinda up to May whether she thinks the risk is worth it or not? Have you asked her?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Tony, I don’t know what impression she gave you, but I’m hardly ever ‘home’.”

“Ah. She made it seem like you were still there and only missed a night or two occasionally.”

“Wishful thinking.”

Another day: “It’s not about you,” Peter said, as he was changing for bed.

“I know kid. You’ve told me that before.”

Tony was laying still. He figured Peter thought he was asleep.

“It’s not  _ all _ about you,” Peter whispered.

Tony didn’t answer. He fought hard to stay still and not react in any way that Peter would be able to detect, even with his enhanced senses. He hoped that the pain in his heart didn’t translate to any readable physical response. He was gone in the morning before Peter woke up.

He didn’t have to go far. The anonymity of a place as busy as Grand Central Terminal, located right below Stark Tower with an entrance connecting them, was perfect. He found a bench out of the way and sat debating internally with himself until most of the morning rush hour had passed. Finally, he buried himself in his phone. Starting from the closest proximity to Peter and working outward, Tony built a list of men who were precisely forty seven years old. There were three. One was Peter’s professor in his materials engineering class. One was the father of one of Peter’s friends. One was a bartender at a place where Peter’s credit cards showed frequent visits. Tony was past caring about ‘gross violations’ of Peter’s privacy.

He’d been out of the penthouse for three hours, but FRIDAY didn’t alert him, so in those three hours Peter hadn’t tried to leave or tried to hurt himself. When he got back, the kid was in his usual spot on the sofa. He huffed angrily in Tony’s direction.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

“Unh.”

It sounded more like a ‘no’ grunt than a ‘yes’ grunt. Tony fixed breakfast for them both.

“Where were you?”

“I had a meeting I couldn’t get out of.”

Peter looked Tony up and down. “Yeah, because Pepper entirely puts up with you showing up to SI meetings looking like a fuckin’ hobo.”

“When did I say the meeting was at SI?”

“Hmpf.” Peter finished his eggs and grabbed a handful of bacon before heading back to the sofa and putting the greasy stuff directly onto Tony’s sculpted glass coffee table before sneaking a look back to see if it got the desired reaction. It didn’t. It took Peter awhile to figure out what Tony had been doing at his ‘meeting’. “I swear to god Tony!”

“Hmm?” Tony looked up from the fabricated prototype version of the glove he was working on.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Yep.”

“How did you find…”

“I’m an asshole, but I’m also Tony Stark. Did you forget about that?”

Peter huffed. “Jerk.”

Around three, Tony got dressed properly in one of his three piece suits. “Does this meeting attire get your approval?”

Peter turned up the volume on the TV and most definitely didn’t watch Tony leave the penthouse.

Peter was an Enhanced Individual and healed quickly. His professor was a mere mortal and didn’t. The scrapes on his knuckles were all the evidence Tony needed. He let the man think that his visit was to give him, or his department, research money. He just nodded along and let the man think what he was going to think.

Suddenly, Tony reached out and grabbed the professor’s wrist, held it tightly, flattening his damaged hand out on the desk. “Here’s what’s going to happen. When I leave, Peter’s going to be transferred into another professor’s class. You’re going to give him a good, but not suspiciously too good, recommendation. Then you’re going to put in your resignation. I don’t give a fuck what excuse you give, you’re going to give one. Then, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get as far away from New York as you possibly can.”

“I don’t think so.”

“There’s another way this can go.”

“I have tenure, you can’t get me fired.”

“Oh, that’s not what I meant. No one will even find your bones.”

“I’ll report you!”

Tony laughed. “Go ahead. Make sure you tell them the reason why I threatened to fly you out to the mid-Atlantic ridge and drop you into the ocean from ten thousand feet.” He stood, straightened out his suit coat, and went to the classroom door. “When I call your department head to sort out Peter’s leave of absence, I’d better hear that everything’s been taken care of.”

Peter rolled his eyes when Tony came back. “You didn’t go to SI.”

“What is it this time? I’m not dressed like ‘a fuckin’ hobo’.”

“Your tie is all the way pulled up.”

“I thought I should look halfway decent when I talked to your department head and got you a leave of absence for the rest of the semester.”

“Oh my god Tony. You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“Any dinner requests?”

“Yeah. Take me out for Thai.”

“Okay.” He sat down and started texting. “Reservations are for eight. Clothes are being sent up before that. I don’t have anything that will fit you.” He paused. “You’ve lost a lot of weight, Peter.”

“I get busy. I don’t eat.”

“Hmm.”

About an hour later, a security guard brought up three garment bags and handed them to Tony. “Seven thirty,” he told the guard. “Two following in a separate car.” He handed the guard a paper with the address. “We’re going out for dinner.”

“Yes sir.”

“I didn’t know what you’d like. There’s a few choices in here.” He tossed the bags onto the back of the sofa.

“You’re actually going to take me out?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Because I plan on running away the first chance I get.”

“Why do you think I ordered security? Be ready to leave for seven fifteen. I don’t like to wait.” Tony went off down the hall to his bedroom to shower and start getting ready.

Peter followed. “You are such a jerk.” He pushed some of Tony’s clothes over in the closet, making room for his. “What are you wearing?”

“Jeans, t-shirt, sport coat, tennis shoes.”

“Okay.” Peter found appropriate clothes for a casual restaurant. “But you are  _ not _ introducing me as your boyfriend.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Tony called from the bathroom. “Any boyfriend of mine who put bacon on my coffee table would be put over my knee and spanked.”

Peter tried not to laugh and hid it by going to use the guest room bathroom so they could dress at the same time. Tony knew his sizes, right down to the shoes. Sometimes it really sucked knowing the man who constructed a large amount of the underlying code for the entire internet as it existed today. And whose father did the same for DARPANet. Privacy? What is privacy? Clearly Tony was back to not respecting his. Honestly, Peter was surprised that during the past year it seemed as if he did.

Just because he thought he should, Peter made an attempt to escape between the time he and Tony got out of his Audi and the guards managed to get out of their non-descript follow car. Tony caught him by the wrist, then by his waist, and politely led him into the restaurant. Peter hadn’t even been really trying, he just thought it should look as if he wanted to get away from being under Tony’s thumb. He hated to admit that it was nice staying at the penthouse and having nothing to worry about.

The dinner was pleasant. Tony tried to make light conversation, and being in public, Peter wasn’t comfortable giving back his usual level of sullenness. Tony explained what he was trying to change in his suit’s gloves. Peter had difficulty creating his own conversation so kept his to responding to Tony’s and asking questions about the tech. Anything about their personal lives during the past year was off limits. 

The food was spectacular and miles above that little place he and May used to go to. But then Peter expected nothing less. Of course a few paps were waiting outside the restaurant when they left. Peter was thankful for the security that was supposed to prevent his escape, but instead prevented them from doing anything but getting a few blurry pictures. It was annoying being with Tony Stark, the persona.


	6. Chapter 6

When they came home, off came the clothes, on came the sweats, and the sofa was once again occupied. Peter thought he could hear a sigh of resignation from Tony as he went back to his work. After about an hour, Peter’s legs were pushed off the end of the sofa, Tony sat there and grabbed the remote off the table. 

“I was watching that,” Peter complained when the channel was switched.

“It’s Netflix. You can be watching that again when I’m finished. I need a brain break.” 

A movie that was still in theatres but not on disk yet was put on. Because of course it was. Like Tony would do something as normal as going out to a movie theatre. Peter was annoyed at having his legs pushed off and having to curl them up if he wanted to stay on the sofa. He stretched them out instead, straight across Tony’s lap.

That was a mistake. About halfway through the movie, Tony began, apparently absent mindedly, massaging his feet. Peter pretended that he was involved in watching the movie and didn’t move them. It wasn’t fair that it felt good.

Tony didn’t even finish watching the thing because with about ten minutes to go, he rushed back to his work table and pulled up the design on the screen to make changes. Peter looked over in disbelief. Who walked out on a movie right before the resolution of the whole damn plot?

After it was over, Peter headed for the bedroom. “Asshole,” he said, remembering what he was sure Tony had done that day, but not elaborating on which thing Tony deserved that comment for.

Tony went to bed around midnight. Peter was still awake and unconvincingly pretending to be asleep. When Tony was under the covers, turned away as usual, he said, “At least I didn’t kill him. Yet. Depends on if he’s gone when I check in the morning.”

Peter quickly rolled over to address Tony’s back. “It’s my life! My mistakes to make!”

“Yes it is. But I love you.” Tony rolled over to face Peter. “I’ll leave you alone to make your mistakes, but I’m not going to let someone abuse you.”

Peter closed his eyes and sighed. “It wasn’t like that,” he said more calmly.

“Yeah, because it’s totally okay that he broke your nose and your eye socket. I’m sure he had a really good excuse for it.”

“Maybe he did!” Peter said angrily again, turning back over.

Tony reached out and touched Peter’s arm. “No baby. There is no good reason for that.”

“I’m not your fuckin’ baby,” Peter said quietly.

“Sorry.” Tony rolled back over.

In the morning, Tony went down to his office so Peter wouldn’t hear the calls he made. The professor was gone on a sudden family emergency that had him leaving for Kansas. Peter was transferred to a new class and was excused from the rest of the semester, with his place held for next.

“You’ll go back to school in January,” Tony told Peter when he got back up to the penthouse.

“It’s only October! God you really can’t leave my life alone, can you?”

“No, I can’t.”

There was no talking for the rest of that day. The next time he spoke, Peter was in the middle of binge watching a stupid detective show because he’d already binge watched all the good things. “It wasn’t just him, either.”

“Didn’t think so. You’re stronger than that.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “This has nothing to do with my ability to stop a bus.”

“Wasn’t talking about that kind of strength.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not as strong as you think.”

“Even a strong person has limits, Peter.”

In bed, Peter rolled over to talk to Tony’s back again. “It was hard keeping the secret in high school. I thought it would get easier. It hasn’t.”

Tony turned to face Peter. “Have you considered not keeping it a secret? None of us do.”

“Yeah, but none of you have non-superhero families. Clint does, but his is hidden away and he’s retired.”

“May’s with Happy now, and despite what it seems, he’s a good heavyweight boxer. And I can make sure she always has a security team.”

“We’re not together, Tony.”

“I know.” Tony paused. “Doesn’t mean I can’t provide one of the Avengers aunt with security.”

“I’d have absolutely no privacy.”

Tony sighed. “I know that’s important to you, but it’s not as bad as you think. I get this level of attention because of who I am outside of Iron Man. The rest of the team don’t get bothered when they’re out of their suits. There’d be a few weeks of you getting a lot of attention, maybe a couple of months, but that would die down.” He made it look like he was just leaning on his arm, but he rested his hand flat on the bed halfway between him and Peter. “Even the ones of us that never had suits don’t get bothered. Wanda goes wherever she wants and no one bothers her.”

Peter leaned on his arm but his hand wasn’t anywhere near Tony’s. “Yeah, but those first few months would be hell.”

Tony nodded. “Not gonna deny that kid. You’d probably have to take next semester as a leave too. Let things die down.”

Peter pulled his arm in and hugged himself. He didn’t meet Tony’s eyes or say anything for a long time. “I’ll think about it,” he said before he rolled over, settling in for sleep.

“Okay.” Tony did the same.

“Get my work from this semester sent over, even though I’m on break,” Peter said at breakfast. It was a statement, not a question, not asking for something.  _ Telling  _ Tony to do something for him. “I can pre-study that way.”

“I’ll do that.” There was no doubt that he could have it done.

Tony was washing the dishes, when he turned to Peter, who was watching a multi-season sitcom and paying it absolutely no attention. “Is it hard to keep up with the classwork?” It was the first direct question Tony asked.

“It wouldn’t be. The work is hard but not that hard.”

“But…?”

“I don’t exactly have time to study. Between classes, after classes, before classes, I’m out patrolling.”

“Maybe you should cut back on that.”

Peter sat up and looked over the back of it into the kitchen. “I can’t.”

“Why?”

Peter sighed. “You guys take care of the world-threatening events. You save thousands, millions, of lives. I stop muggers, thieves. I save one or two lives at a time. Those lives need to be saved too.”

“I know. You do the same work that Murdock does in Hell’s Kitchen. That Luke Cage does in Harlem. I know it’s important. But, baby, you’re entitled to have your own life too.”

Peter let the ‘baby’ slide. “People die when I have my own life.”

“You’ll never stop every criminal in the city. People die when you  _ don’t  _ have your own life.”

“I know. I’m never good enough,” Peter said sadly.

Tony sat on his end of the sofa. “Petey, you could patrol 24/7 and still not catch every criminal. It’s not humanly possible. You’re good enough.”

Peter pulled his legs up, curling them against his chest, wrapping his arms around them. “Yeah, but I have to do what I can.”

“What you can includes time for you to study, to finish your degree, to have a part of your life that isn’t devoted to other people. You have to have that.” Peter didn’t answer. “You’re strong, baby, but no one’s strong enough to handle not having a life of their own.”

He didn’t let that one slide. “I am  _ not _ your baby.”

Tony didn’t apologize. “I work. Wanda designs and makes her own clothes. Cap’s fond of going fishing with Sam, and he and Bucky fuck like rabbits. Bruce does research. Clint and Scott have their families. Nat, I don’t know what she does. She doesn’t tell anyone anything. Maybe being private is her form of stress relief. She never had much of a life that wasn’t controlled by someone. We all have a social life with each other, too.” Tony moved closer to Peter, ran his hand down the boy’s calf, over his shin. “Everyone has a life outside of saving other people, saving the world.”

Peter swallowed. He sucked his lips into his mouth. He hugged himself tighter. His eyes got moist. He didn’t pull away from Tony’s touch. “I can’t get rid of the guilt.”

Tony paused a long time. Before their relationship blew up, when they were just friends, he and Peter talked a lot about their lives. He took his hand off of Peter. He knew that this line of thought would be too much for him to handle while also dealing with the complicated feelings of having Tony touch him. He spoke softly. “Your guilt isn’t about them.” 

The tears in Peter’s eyes began to fall. “It was my fault.”

He hitched his leg up onto the sofa so he could turn to face Peter. “You know that’s not true. In your head, I mean, not in your heart. You don’t know that there yet.” Peter nodded. “You were a kid. You’d had arguments with your uncle before, I know you had. Kids have arguments with their family. It’s normal. It just happened that during that argument, a mugger came up and killed your uncle, leaving the argument the last thing you said to him. But I swear to you Petey, your argument was  _ not _ the last thing he was thinking about.” Tears were flowing freely down Peter’s face. “I promise you that. If I… If something happened to me… no matter what happened this past year… being upset about it wouldn’t be my last thought about you. It wasn’t Ben’s last thought about you.” 

It was hard sitting there, watching Peter cry, not doing anything about it. He wanted to hold him. To have him close. To comfort him. He struggled with his desire. But when Peter’s tears turned into breath-hitching sobs, it was too much. “Baby, come here.” He put his arms out. Peter climbed across the sofa and let Tony hold him. Nothing was said, Tony just rubbed Peter’s back, stroked his hair, and held him close. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Shh baby. It’s okay.” Tony let him stay in his arms as long as he wanted.

“I don’t want anyone to love me,” he said against Tony’s chest.

“They’re gonna anyway. That’s not something you can control.”

“Why?”

“That’s something philosophers have been asking since the beginning of time.” Tony put a light kiss on the top of Peter’s head. Peter flinched but didn’t move away. “No matter how much you kick May out of your life, you can’t control the fact that she loves you.” He paused. “Peter, no matter how much you kick me out of your life, you can’t control the fact that I’m in love with you. I accept that I can’t have you, that I won’t act on it, that you don’t love me, but my feelings are out of your control.”

“I don’t want you,” Peter said, sitting up, moving away from Tony’s embrace.

“I understand that.”

“You have a boyfriend anyway.”

“I have someone I take as my plus-one when required. I have someone I fuck when I’m in the mood to put my dick into something other than my fist. I do not have a boyfriend, no matter what he and the media like to think.”

“That’s not fair to him.”

Tony shrugged. “As you’ve pointed out, life isn’t fair to the other person.”

“How do you live with the guilt?”

“I assume we’re not talking about the model I’m fucking?” Tony sighed. “You fix what you can, you promise to do better where you can, and you accept the things you can’t do anything about. I don’t have any better advice to give you. For all of us there are times we can’t save them, not even the ones we care about. You have to accept that you’ll never save them all. Even in trying, you might save the one in your eyeline, but lose others on the way to saving that one. Do you have any idea how many people died in New York from collateral damage? From buildings and debris falling on them as we tried to save other people? It’s an impossible job, the one we’re doing. Adults have a hard time dealing with it. You were fifteen when you started. You need to grant yourself a little grace, kid.” Tony got up and patted Peter on the shoulder as he went back to his work table.


	7. Chapter 7

They usually had one conversation during the day and one at night when they were both pretending to be asleep. That night was no different.

“Are you really in love with me Anthony?”

Tony flinched. He squeezed his eyes shut. “You don’t get to call me that,” he forced out, trying to hide how shaky his breaths were. If Peter said anything else, Tony really didn’t hear, he wasn’t just pretending not to.

When Peter got up, Tony wasn’t in the penthouse as far as he could tell. It was three in the afternoon before Tony came out of the guest room, poured himself a cup of coffee, and went downstairs to the workshop for the first time since Peter had arrived. Breakfast wasn’t made nor was dinner.

Tony came up to bed around one in the morning. Peter was already in it. He climbed in and nothing was said between them.

In the morning, breakfast was made. Tony read the headlines on his pad while he and Peter ate. He cleared the dishes, left it to U to finish up the cleaning, and went back to work at his work table upstairs while Peter watched TV as usual.

“Do you want to call one of those numbers, Peter?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Tony texted May his usual update about Peter’s condition without telling her what had happened to make him go missing.

“I wanted you that night.” A late afternoon comment.

“I thought you did. You didn’t.”

“I did,” Peter argued.

“No, kid. You didn’t. You wanted someone other than me.”

Peter sighed. He didn’t eat dinner when Tony fixed it, but stayed on the sofa. “You don’t get to control what I’m feeling either.”

Tony went to bed. Peter fell asleep on the sofa with the TV running.

“Why, Peter?” Tony asked while he was working.

Peter huffed a breath.

“It wasn’t me, or not all me. It wasn’t your professor, or not all him. It wasn’t your classes. It wasn’t Spider-Man. It wasn’t the guilt. You’ve told me a lot of reasons it  _ wasn’t _ .”

“You’re not supposed to ask me questions,” Peter said, surprised at Tony’s being direct.

“Yeah, and you’re not supposed to try to manipulate the fuck out of me.”

In bed, Peter rolled over, wrapped his arms tightly around himself, and spoke to Tony’s back. “It wasn’t any of those things.” He sighed, a little disappointed that Tony didn’t turn to face him. “It was everything.”

“Which of those things did you lie to me about?”

“I…” He rolled back to face the windows. “The classes.”

“Okay, Peter.”

It was like listening to a faucet perpetually dripping once or twice a day. But as long as those drips were coming, Tony stayed home. He answered texts, he kept in touch without taking calls. He deflected a lot more than usual onto Pepper and told Cap that unless the world was ending right then and there, Iron Man was busy. He shifted his own work files to things that could be handled upstairs. And he waited for the next drop to fall.

“I knew you were in love with me.”

“Okay.” Tony paused and fiddled unproductively with a bit of the projection. “My being in love with you doesn’t obligate you to do anything. I know that now. It’s entirely a me problem.”

The second drop of the day fell.

“I didn’t expect you to give up.”

Tony laughed quietly in bed. “Funny thing about being in love. You want the other person to be happy. Even if that’s not with you.”

“I never thought that you were that selfless.”

“Me either kid. But then I’ve never been in love before.” Tony knew it was a hell of a bombshell to drop, and it had the effect of shutting Peter up for the night. But it was the truth. If they were telling truths, Peter deserved his as much as the boy was telling Tony his own. 

Tony didn’t wait for the inevitable afternoon drop to drip out of the faucet. As soon as the breakfast dishes were up, he sat at his worktable, turned the chair to face the sofa and spoke. “The classes are solved until next semester at least. You know you’re going to have to take time for your life because we all do. You know what’s up with the guilt and either you’re going to work that problem on your own or you’re going to eventually call one of those numbers and learn how to deal, same as learning any other skill. Your professor, in and of himself, isn’t a problem anymore.” Tony let the statements hang in the air, not followed by any questions.

“God Tony this isn’t some mechanical problem you can just solve!”

“Everything is skill building. When I needed to learn a skill about how to handle things post-wormhole, I went to someone who knew that skill and had him teach me. It is kind of a mechanical problem, adulting.”

“Listen to the old man using the cool kids terms.”

Tony huffed a laugh. “Listen to the cool kid pretending like he invented internet culture.”

“There wasn’t a question in there.” 

“Nope.” Tony didn’t turn around but kept staring at the body on the sofa. “There’s not gonna be. If I don’t ask a question then I don’t get bullshit answers.”

“Which questions would you want to have answered.”

“Some of them I already know.”

“Maybe you’re wrong,” Peter said angrily.

“I doubt it very much. Shrinks have nothing to go by except what they’ve read in books.”

Peter scoffed. “And you’re a shrink?”

“God no. I’m just a fellow fuckup.”

“Who’s in love with me.”

“There’s that.”

“When will you let me out of here?”

“Look kid, I’m gonna be honest with you. It’s either you stay here with me until I’m satisfied you’re not a danger to yourself, or you go to a nice private rubber room paid for by me with doctors on my payroll who won’t be letting you out until they’re satisfied you’re not a danger to yourself.”

“It’s not going to be when I finally let you fuck me?” Peter asked, smug, thinking that he had it figured it out.

“If all I wanted was to fuck you, I could’ve had that a year ago.”

“Then when you make me be in love with you,” he said, still thinking he had Tony’s number.

Tony chuckled. “Magicians, alchemists, and witches have been trying to find out how to do that for centuries.” He shook his head. “Even if there was a miracle potion, I wouldn’t use it.”

“Why? You’d get what you want.”

“It’s not real,” he said flatly. “It’s a lie,” he added with more heat to the words than he’d intended.

“Is lying a thing with you Anthony?”

Tony tried hard not to rise to the bait. He failed. “The rubber room is looking more and more likely, kid.” He walked out and downstairs.

When Peter went downstairs and looked in the lab, there was no one there. Friday, his phone rang.

“Mister Parker? I’m Doctor Adair. You’re scheduled for an appointment for Monday at one p.m. at home.”

“Fuck you, you can cancel it.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the doctor said. 

“Yeah, it is. If you come here I’m not letting you in.”

“Mister Stark left me his keycode to the elevator.”

“Fine. I’ll be locked in the guest room and you can… I dunno… steal something from him as far as I care. Check his dressing room. There’s jewelry and shit in there.”

The doctor was persistent. Everyday he showed up. Not always at the same time. But everytime it was to a closed and locked door.

“Tell that coward he can face me himself or I  _ will _ find a way out of here.”

The doctor stopped coming by the end of the week. Peter’s phone rang again and it was May. He ghosted her. When the phone kept ringing, he sank it into a bathtub full of water. When one of Tony’s phones started to ring, it went swimming with his. Every one that rang, joined the tub as soon as Peter found it. His laptop pinged and he threw that in there too. Same with Tony’s tablet that was sitting on the workstation. “You can tell him I’m more than happy to keep ruining his tech,” he muttered to the room as he stretched out on the sofa. “He can afford it.”

Another week passed and the fridge was looking more and more empty. “What’s the fucker going to do, starve me out?”

The next day the elevator opened and it was full of groceries. Peter tried to escape down it, but the buttons refused to work and even the escape hatch was keyed to something he couldn’t figure out.

He waited until the next day when something began leaking out of the bottom of one of the bags, to get the groceries and put them away. While he was in the kitchen, the elevator closed.

“You really are an asshole. I know you’re going to come back eventually. You live here.” The TV screen began playing a slideshow of homes, apartments, islands, yachts. Peter lost count. The slideshow didn’t repeat any pictures. When Peter woke up, it was still running, but with hotel rooms and office buildings.

“I get the fucking point. Put ‘Friends’ on again.” The Netflix menu came up.

Another two days passed. “Call him FRIDAY.”

“I have been left with a message for you Peter. Attempting to contact Mister Stark is a ‘gross violation of his privacy’.”

“I’m not going to kill myself, I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”

Peter was so bored with Netflix he was scrolling through non-recorded cable TV channels. They started out defaulting to the presets Tony had for them. CNBC, some other financial news, CNN, yet more news channels. He had to wait for all the presets to scroll past until the remote worked for him. “God could you make your TV a little more annoy… Fuck. Fuck me. You bastard!” It was Tony and his not-a-boyfriend caught on the red carpet of the Met Gala from the night before. The not-a-boyfriend was dressed according to theme, Tony was simply dressed in an impeccable tuxedo. They smiled prettily for the cameras. Tony put his hand on the small of the not-a-boyfriend’s back. They leaned closer together, sharing a whisper and the not-a-boyfriend laughed. Then the camera went to the next couple in the procession.

Peter didn’t get out of Tony’s bed for the next two days. When he did, it was to grab a two bottles of water and climb right back in. He refilled the bottles from the bathroom sink when he went to use it. He turned on the bedroom TV to one of the entertainment channels, put the captions on, and turned the volume off. He rarely bothered to look at it though so it took him awhile before he caught the next glimpse of Tony. It was the report about the final day of the Cannes Film Festival. At least not-a-boyfriend wasn’t there with him. It was some not-a-girlfriend. A different not-a-girlfriend than the not-a-girlfriend who showed up the following weekend at the Monaco Grand Prix. A week later at a party for MoMA, even though it was in New York, where the not-a-boyfriend was, Tony was with a different not-a-boyfriend.

Peter wasn’t obsessed with watching the bedroom TV. He still spent most of his days on the sofa churning through more and more obscure Netflix shows, moving on to the movies, usually bad, that were on there. He never cooked, just ate whatever out of the cabinets. A lot of dry cereal before he found his way into the snack crackers that were meant for party canapes. He certainly never bothered to clean up after himself. Whatever DUM-E and U didn’t take care of sat there. He only watched the bedroom TV for a few hours before he fell asleep. And maybe a couple more if he woke up during the night. 

“FRIDAY, what happens if I attempt to leave or harm myself?”

“That varies depending on the method of each.”

“The most likely ones?”

“Doctor Adair will be called. EMTs if necessary.”

“He’s not coming back?”

FRIDAY went back to not talking to Peter.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said quietly. There was no answer. Peter went back to bed. Nothing happened after his apology.


	8. Chapter 8

Six days later, the elevator dinged and Tony stepped out of it, carrying a suit bag and a large duffel. He walked right past Peter who was, as usual, on the sofa. He went into his bedroom where he opened the luggage and began unpacking.

“Nice of you to come back,” Peter huffed from the doorway.

“I had things I need to do.”

“Yeah, I saw some of the  _ things _ you were doing.”

“Whether you like it or not, my life doesn’t revolve around you. I spent over a month avoiding my responsibilities. They caught up to me.”

“You’re calling  _ that  _ responsibilities?”

Tony started hanging up his clothes and putting them away in drawers. “Yes, I am. Maintaining a certain level of public presence is a responsibility that I have to SI. Whether  _ I  _ like it or not.”

“Seemed like you liked it.”

“It’s supposed to. Now if you don’t mind, I’m jetlagged as fuck and need to get myself back on east coast time.”

“You were in New York last week.”

“And I was in Malaysia yesterday. One doesn’t cancel out the other. We can talk in the morning.”

“For someone who doesn’t like lying, you’re doing a good job of it right now.”

Tony tossed him his phone. “Call Pepper. She has my travel itinerary for the last month. Now let me sleep. FRIDAY, darken the windows and set a six a.m. alarm.”

“Yes boss.”

When Peter woke up at nine, Tony was in the front room cleaning up. The extras from breakfast were on a hotplate.

“You’re just going to walk back in here like nothing happened?” Peter asked, sitting down to the dining table with some real food.

“Kinda what you do after a business trip, kid. Though cleaning up after you was never on the agenda before.”

“Can I leave now?”

Tony waved his phone at the elevator. The light around the ‘down’ button came on. “Be my guest.”

“No rubber room?”

“You’ve gone about two months without trying to kill yourself. At this point it’s a ‘you and May’ problem. You’ve made it clear it’s not a ‘me’ problem.”

“Are you still in love with me?”

“Not any of your business.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“It’s a ‘not entirely sure at this point’. Why don’t you ask Cap how long it takes me to get over shit when people I just ‘like’ betray me, much less someone I was in love with.”

“When did I…”

“I’m not doing this, kid. Kinda done playing games with you. There’s the door. Or you can keep occupying a spot on the sofa or in the guest room. Not my room.” Tony went into the kitchen and started rinsing the pile of dishes in both sides of the sink and filling the dishwasher.

“It hurt me to see you with them,” Peter said quietly, still sitting at the dining table.

“That would be the definition of a ‘you’ problem.”

“God Tony!”

“What? Not trying to manipulate me today Peter? That’s almost disappointing.” Tony spoke in a conversational tone as he kept working.

“Would you stop?”

“Peter, some of us adults living in the ‘adulting’ world have to clean up after sullen bratty twenty year olds who get so upset about their lack of responsibility that they slice their arms open for attention, before we can go downstairs and get back to working for a living.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

Tony turned around. “There. Is. The. Door.” He started the dishwasher and went into his dressing room. When Peter followed him there, he was sorting through clothes, putting some in a laundry bag, others in a bag marked ‘dry cleaning’.

“What would you know about responsibility! Your responsibilities are fucking off to Europe for a month!”

“I don’t owe you an explanation for my life. But I’ll give you one. I already told you that Pepper has my travel itinerary. You can check my pad for projects completed May/June. Projects due June/July. That’s if there isn’t something I have to suit up for like I did in Malaysia, putting everything behind by six days.”

“You were in New York last…”

“Yes. And I thought I was coming home then. But some fucking idiot decided to put a dirty bomb in one of the biggest hotels in the world. Which I took care of. Then took care of finding the fucking idiot so that he didn’t put a dirty bomb in the next biggest hotel on his list. Finding his plutonium supplier took a little bit longer than that. You wanna call Nat to double check on me?”

“I didn’t see any of that on TV.”

“Funny thing kid, what happens in Malaysia in real time, doesn’t make it to Netflix or the Entertainment Network. Now if it meets with your approval, I’d like to call my assistant to get two months of dirty clothes to the cleaners so I can go downstairs and work. Sam’s been having problems with his drone and Clint sent me an outline for a new type of arrow he wants made. Oh, and there are all those June/July things on SI’s list. If you’re still here when she comes upstairs, tell her the laundry’s in my dressing room.”

Peter blinked, stunned, as Tony walked past him and down the stairs to his lab. He directed Tony’s new assistant to where the dressing room was and helped her drag the laundry bags to the elevator. 

“Is there a washing machine in here somewhere?” he asked her.

“There’s a door at the end of the guest hall that is a utility closet. Washer and dryer are there, but Mister Stark has his laundry and dry cleaning both done out.”

“Thanks.”

Peter went into Tony’s dressing room, found a pair of sweats and a one of Tony’s tank tops, gathered his laundry, which was everything he had, and started it washing. He padded naked into the guest room and took a shower before dressing and resuming his spot on the sofa.

“It  _ was  _ your fault, y’know,” he called, loud enough to be heard downstairs.

“Gee, you think?” Tony called back.

“God you drive me crazy.”

“Feeling’s mutual. You wanna help me with this damn drone so I can work on the arrows?”

“Yeah.”

When Peter got downstairs, Tony handed him the drone and swiped the schematics over to the secondary holotable. He raised an eyebrow at the clothes Peter was wearing. Before he would’ve filled out the shirt, even if the pants would’ve then hung loosely on his hips. Now, both shirt and pants hung not just loosely but baggy. He shrugged and went back to the arrow design. “Why the fuck Clint needs an arrow capible of having six lasers do a flat radial sweep is beyond me. A conical one would make much more sense and not risk catching him in the fire.”

“Do both and see which one he likes better?”

“Eh. It’s no more work to angle the beam aspect ratio. In fact…” Tony went back to work for a couple of hours without interruption. “There. Selective aspect ratio. He can set it with a click before he draws it from the quiver. FRIDAY, fabricate three test samples. Ship them to Clint with instructions on how to use them so he doesn’t chop his fingers off when he does.” He turned to Peter. “How’s the drone coming?”

“Finished the repair. Working on the housing attachment. It takes too long to release.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get to that. Sam says it doesn’t need to be faster.”

“But faster’s better,” Peter argued, testing the release on the light projection.

“Tried to tell him that.”

“The spiders release instantaneously.”

“That’s nanotech. Sam’s is mechanical. Only so fast you can get with that.”

“Faster than he’s got though.”

“I’m gonna cook dinner. Keep plugging away at it, kid. Try… fuck… it’s expensive as fuck for something as disposable as a drone…” His thought trailed off before he picked it up again. “Wait. It doesn’t have to go on the drone. Put them on the wing housing. Try the carbon-vibranium nanotubes for the clips on his wings. The vibranium will keep its spring. Use something designed to be breakable and replaced on the drone.”

“You’ve got a supply of…?” Peter asked, surprised. He laughed. “Of course you do. Nevermind.”

During dinner they talked about Peter’s project. After, Tony leaned back in his chair. “Didn’t take a genius to figure out it was about me, kid. Why? That’s what I don’t understand.”

Peter was hesitant. That was a conversation best had on the sofa while watching TV or in bed turned away from Tony. Not for sitting up in a dining room chair where they could see each other. But then Tony didn’t ask questions before either. He tried to hide his face by rubbing at his forehead. “I don’t want to be responsible for you being in love with me.”

“You’re not.”

“Yeah, but if I’d stayed, I kinda would’ve been.”

“We weren’t anywhere near that point yet.”

Peter laughed. “What, you would’ve turned into a ‘take it slow’ kinda guy?”

“Uh… okay you’ve got a point. But I would’ve tried to be more of a ‘take it at  _ your  _ pace’ kinda guy. You’re a hell of a lot younger than me. That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“I’m not…”

“Yeah, you are. Look, I’m not hung up on the age difference. We wouldn’t have even gotten to where we were or where we are now if I was. But like with all adulting mechanical problems, there are some givens. I’ve got a lot more experience in handling this shit.”

“What shit?”

“ _ This _ shit. Relationships, breakups, heartbreak, disappointment, things not going the way you want them to. That shit. Not saying it’s better or worse or whatever. It’s just miles under the belt, kid. You learn to deal.”

“Yeah, cos you handled it so well,” Peter said sarcastically.

“At least my rebound didn’t break my fucking nose. So yeah. The model wasn’t my first rebound, not the first person I used to get me over something that didn’t go my way. You eventually learn to stop hurting yourself. It’s not that I didn’t want to, it’s that I learned. That’s all. That’s why I would’ve  _ tried  _ to be a ‘take it at your speed’ kinda guy. Obviously I failed kind of spectacularly at that.”

“You didn’t. You just wanted…” Peter sighed. “What I was afraid to give you.”

“Every time you give a piece of yourself away, it takes time to grow that back. Even when that piece isn’t being in love with someone.”

“Did you lie to me?” Peter asked.

“Petey, I have never lied to you about anything. But you’re going to have to be more specific about what you  _ think  _ I lied to you about.”

“I can’t…”

“Yeah, well I’m kinda done talking to your back. So if this conversation continues, you’re gonna have to ‘can’.”

“I can’t.”

Tony stood and started clearing dinner. “Okay kid. Get back to me when you can.” When he was done, he went into his bedroom. The door didn’t open when Peter tried it later that night. He swapped out his forgotten laundry and slept in the guest room.


	9. Chapter 9

“I don’t want to be in love with you,” Peter said over breakfast.

“I know that.”

“I don’t want you to be in love with me.”

“I know that too. 

“Why?” he asked, hiding his face behind another forehead rub, hoping Tony wouldn’t notice how moist his eyes were.

“That’s something you have to answer for yourself. If I tell you…” Tony sighed. “You’re not gonna be able to take it in.”

“God how do you  _ know _ ?”

“Years kid. It’s nothing but years.”

“What if…” Peter’s voice broke. “What if I know but can’t say.”

“Then you’ve got to get from there to there. That’s not something anyone can do for you. Not even a shrink. And I’m  _ so _ not a shrink.”

“But you know.”

“Pretty sure.”

“How?”

“Been there, done that. With my own set of failures in the process.”

Peter plopped himself on the sofa again.

“We’re back to this? At least make yourself useful.”

“What?”

“Pick one of the damn projects on my list. Earn your fuckin’ keep. You can mumble your pearls of wisdom just as well from a worktable as you can from a sofa.”

Peter was trying to fit three times as many circuits in the same square inches as the previous phone’s size. “People who love me die.”

“That’s half of it.”

“People I love die.”

“There’s the other half. May’s still alive.”

“Matter of time. Enough people want me dead. If they knew she was related to Spider-Man…”

“She could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Peter huffed. “One’s more likely than the other.”

“Really? With the Avengers protecting her? With a security detail? With living in this highly secure building? Odds are better for the bus, Petey.”

“She doesn’t live here.”

“Peter, I own the building. If I say clean out floor thirty five and make an apartment out of it, floor thirty five is cleaned out and an apartment is made out of it.”

“But I couldn’t…”

“Do you have a problem comprehending math, Pete?”

“What?”

“How much is one billion?”

“Oh.”

“How much is forty? And that’s just the assets I have unencumbered access to. Now add in the value of my SI shares. Add in the amount of VC I have out floating around. Add in… oh fuck I don’t know. That’s what Pepper’s for.” He rolled his eyes at the ridiculousness of trying to calculate his net worth. He turned back to Peter more seriously again. “Exactly how much do you think supporting your aunt  _ and  _ you for the rest of your lives is going to cost? Do you think I’m not going to be able to upgrade to that new yacht I saw in Monaco if I do? Or buy more carbon-vibranium nanotubes to replace the ones you fucked up in your first fabrication yesterday?”

“I can’t.”

“Why? It doesn’t stop any of the other Avengers.”

“I don’t want to be like them to you.”

“How is that?”

“Using you.”

Tony smiled. “At least someone recognizes it.” He shrugged. “It comes with the territory, Peter. It’s one of those inescapable facts. At a certain level of wealth, that’s pretty much all people do. I have enough to insulate me from the damage.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Baby, that right there makes all the difference in the world.” Tony caught himself. “Sorry.”

Peter went back to working on the phone’s circuit board.

“Who else loves you that you put at risk of being killed,” Tony asked

“You,” Peter said quietly.

“Wow. Thanos couldn’t kill me but Peter Parker’s shit luck is gonna get me. That’s some accomplishment, kid.”

Peter smiled, buried his face in his hands, and shook his head.

Tony laughed. “Petey, we’re… I dunno… fuckin’ superheroes. It’s a daily risk. Why do you think I work so hard on the tech? Your suit? My suit? That drone? Those arrows? You mitigate what you can. The rest?” He shrugged. “Out of your control. The wormhole taught me that. At some point you make a decision. You decided not to let go of the Q ship and follow us to Titan. You turned to dust. It broke my heart but it is what it is.”

“You brought me back.”

“Yeah, I’m stubborn like that. Who’s idea was it to get Thor to jumpstart my nanite device and to have Strange pull whatever rabbit he pulled out of his hat to get rid of the Stones’ effect on me? When everyone else,  _ everyone _ else gave up?”

“Yeah, I’m stubborn like that.” He looked over at Tony and grinned. “You just love me because I saved your life.”

“And you just love me because I saved yours.” Tony took a beat. “Oh wait. You don’t love me. Sorry.”

“I don’t want to love you.”

Tony sighed heavily. “Yeah, and there’ve been a couple of days lately where I didn’t want to love you either.”

They broke for dinner and since Peter couldn’t drop things in bed anymore, this became the time for it. “Do you still want to fuck me?”

Tony tried not to choke on his drink. “That depends.”

“On?”

“If it’s going to be a repeat performance of last time.” Tony set his knife and fork across his plate. “And what we’re going to do about the fact that I’m in love with you and you don’t want to be in love with me. If I’m looking for someone just to fuck, I kinda have a contacts list full of them that are a whole lot easier than looking at something I can’t have.”

“If you could have it, would that change things?”

“Yeah, if I could have it, it might. Thing is, could I ever trust that wasn’t being manipulated again? You might not want to use me for my money, but there are a whole lot of other ways to be used. I’m not any fonder of them than of the other.”

“Have you ever gotten over that?” Peter asked quietly.

Tony shrugged. “Barnes and I have a decent relationship. The other Rogues, water under the bridge. You can’t expect everyone to share your political opinion. Pepper and I… there’s a lot of complication there but we kinda did it to each other, so there’s an understanding. The others… outliving them brings a whole lot of peace. But me and Cap…” Tony shook his head. “I can make polite when needed but it’s not going to ever be right. That’s more than just a lack of trust. More than just betrayal. In answer to your question, yes, lying is a thing for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Tony tried to hide his face with his hand on his forehead, like Peter’d been doing. “It’s…” He took a long, slow breath and paused. “I thought…” He shook his head. “ _ I  _ can’t.” He left the table and went to his room.

Peter knocked softly on Tony’s door before he went to bed. There wasn’t an answer so he went to the guest bedroom again.

Conversation was faltering in the morning. Kept mostly to what either of them was working on. In the workshop it was the same.    


“I want to trust you again, kid. I do.” Tony turned the display for a new car battery around, looking for the flaws. “Because even without that, I’m still in love with you. So it’s kinda… conflicting.” At least both of them falling into their work was better than the work/sofa/Netflix option.

“I couldn’t before, today I can,” Peter said later in the afternoon.

“Okay. You asked if I lied to you. I haven’t, but you obviously think I did. What about?”

Peter paused, rethinking his words. “Okay you said you didn’t lie… did you… fuck! There are things you said that are…” He pursed his lips. “You say they’re a ‘you’ problem but just knowing it exists is… fuck. If you were lying it would be easier. It’s a lot of fucking responsibility.”

“You can’t control whether or not I love you. It’s not your responsibility if I do.”

“Okay yeah, but there’s  _ a  _ responsibility if not  _ the _ responsibility and I don’t know if I… God I’m not making sense.”

“Stop trying to pre-think it and say it.”

“Did you  _ mean _ it when you said I was the first person you’ve been in love with?”

“Ah,” Tony said, seeing Peter’s dithering come into focus. “Yeah.”

“Tony, how?” Peter asked incredulously.

“Quantity doesn’t equal quality,” Tony said with a chuckle.

“Yeah, but you and Pepper…”

“Were  _ so  _ not good for each other. You gotta understand, we spent so many years in each other’s pockets it was hard to tell where one type of relationship ended and another began. Until we tried to live together without working together. Man did  _ that  _ ever show up the dividing lines. Things are much better now than pretending we’re something to each other that we aren’t.”

“You didn’t love her?”

“No. I wasn’t ever in love with her.”

“Why me?”

“Absolutely no idea, kid. I just…” He shook his head and made a half-shrug. “I fell.”

“When?”

“Waaay before I should’ve. Just leave it at that, okay?”

Peter laughed. “Fuckin’ perv.”

“Let’s just say that I spent a lot of time on websites looking up the legal age of consent in New York and exactly what that entailed,” Tony said laughing at himself.

“Yeah, but you waited.”

“Because I’m not a fuckin’ perv. But jesus Petey, I have eyes, okay? And I’m only human.” He grinned. “I coulda gone after you a year earlier in New York. I waited until it was legal in all fifty.”

“You  _ are  _ a perv.”

“No,” Tony corrected. “Barely legal isn’t a perv, it’s a porn category.”


	10. Chapter 10

Even if the sullen Netflix watching was over, brain breaks were a needed thing. Peter and Tony were at opposite ends of the sofa watching…

“Kid, I should kill you for making me sit through the fuckin’ prequels.”

“Yeah well I don’t like the special edition version of Episode IV And the despecialized version has shit video especially at, what the fuck is that screen anyway?”

“I figured you were watching so much TV, it should be on a good screen.”

“It takes up half the damn wall, _ Tony_. And it’s a big fuckin’ wall, _ Tony_.”

Tony grabbed the remote. “Who said special edition or despecialized? What I said was Star Wars. And we know not of this ‘Episode IV’ you speak, young Jedi.”

“Holy shit does that mean… HOW?”

“Collectors keep all sorts of things they shouldn’t. For enough money, they’re willing to part with them. Even if it is a complete 70mm film print of the 1977 release of Star Wars. Getting it transferred to HD was no problem. Although the film has a look and feel that HD will never replicate. Wanna see it on film? I try not to show it often; the wear is awful. And it’s irreplaceable since George is sitting his ass on the only other copies.” Tony laughed. “Do you have any idea how much he’s offered, not just in money, to let him burn mine?”

“Why didn’t I know you were into Star Wars?”

“C’mon kid, I was seven when it was released. How _ wouldn’t _I have been into Star Wars?”

“Now Petey,” Tony said while Happy was driving them home from Lincoln Square. “The next time you get it in your head to force me to watch some of George’s film vomit, I reserve the right to murder you.” 

Peter leaned over and kissed Tony on the cheek. They both pretended not to notice.

Back home, Peter was full of questions about which pop-culture movies Tony had seen as a kid. It took him pulling up IMDB to get release dates. 

“Return of the Jedi, of course…”

“Nope.”

“No?” Peter asked, eyebrows heading upward.

Tony shrugged. “My, uh, flirtation, with normal was over with by then.”

“Shit, you were only… thirteen?”

“Last movie from that era I remember was Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“You were…,” more IMDB scrolling, “eleven!”

“Stuff falls by the wayside. I was finishing boarding school at the same time as I was clearing prereqs for MIT so that when I got there I could go straight into required courses and finish in two years. Then I was doing my two Master’s. I could’ve done both in two years, but I did a completely unrememberable _ fuckton _ of partying, so got both in three. After that,” he shrugged again, “shit happened. And after that I was running SI. I never noticed things like movies. I was playing with bigger, better toys.”

“When did you go to boarding school?”

“Fuck kid, I’m sure someone out there has done a bio or two on me. I’ll have Pep send one up.” The lighthearted reminiscing was gone and Tony sounded like he was skirting the boundary between angry and annoyed.

It was late, but Tony went down to the lab and picked up what he’d been working on before their movie break, instead of going to bed. Peter followed and started back on his project as well.

“Did you ever…”

“What?” He sounded only slightly irritated instead of annoyed.

“What I did,” Peter said quietly.

“I don’t know, Petey,” he said sarcastically. “How many ODs qualify as a bona fide suicide attempt like yours and not just one of those pathetic ‘cries for help’?” 

Tony turned to face Peter, his voice and manner softening. “Look, I’m not trying to be a shit. When I said it was age, experience, miles under the belt?” He sighed. “_ That’s _ how I knew. You wake up in the hospital enough different times after enough different bouts of alcohol, or coke, or whateverthefuck else. Sometimes you don’t wake up for three days but you still wake the fuck up even when you don’t want to. Eventually you stop and move on or you don’t wake up.”

Work continued long after it should’ve ended and bed wasn’t hit until almost two in the morning. Even so, by nine, Peter woke to the smell of breakfast. 

“What if…”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Petey,” Tony said laughing. “This is my second cup of coffee and I only fell asleep about three hours ago. Give me at least until… cup four, okay?”

Peter laughed. “Okay Tony.”

Before cup four was finished, an alarm on Tony’s phone rang. “Shit. Hey intern, how’s that phone doing?”

“I’m not your fuckin’…” Peter swallowed it back. “It still needs a lot of work, but it’s about…”

“A quarter done at least?” Tony shouted back from his dressing room. 

Peter picked up Tony’s abandoned coffee cup and brought it to him. “About a third to a half depending on how the tests I was going to run today go.”

Tony finished the coffee with a grateful ‘thanks’ as he dressed. “God that’s better than I’d hoped. Go downstairs and send my phone what you had at one quarter — can’t get their expectations up. One of these days Pepper will learn that I don’t check my phone the night before for last minute meetings she schedules for the next day.”

Three hours later, Tony was back in jeans and a t-shirt joining Peter in the lab. “You saved my ass there, Pete. Thanks. I hate doing phone updates. I always put them off til last. Why she can’t palm them off onto someone in the… I dunno… we have a whole fuckin’ division for that shit.”

“Because this update has you live beta’ing that new battery you’ve been working on for three days.”

“It does? Shit. How did you get so far on it without this?”

“I’ve been watching what you’re doing and just leaving gaps for where I think what you’re doing is going. Your ‘whole fuckin’ division’ doesn’t have that kind of access.” Peter laughed. “You wanna give it to them?”

“Hell no! Not only would they drive me apeshit making me try to explain, but the patent hasn’t been filed yet. Too many assholes like Beck working for me. Apple would have it before the end of the day.”

“Do you have the attachment points yet? That would help.”

“Uh…”

Peter shrugged. “I still have audio and imaging to work on before it becomes necessary.”

“Peter, how did you know that what I’m working on had any connection to what you are?”

He shook his head. “You sent me that list of projects, right? The order they were in told me that.”

“Yeah, but this is the bigger version I’m working on. The one for the car.”

“Bigger, smaller, doesn’t matter. It looks the same except for those attachment points. Don’t rush it though. Finish the car first. Audio’s only going to take me until the end of the day, but I want to try something different with the imaging.”

“Upgrade, not reinvent the wheel.”

Peter rolled his eyes.

“No, seriously Petey.” Tony turned his chair to Peter. “Look, this isn’t lab shit, this is business shit. Each upgrade has to improve the previous by no more than five percent. More than five and the end price is going to be too high too soon for the consumer to want to pay.”

“But the increase in imaging quality isn’t going to cost…”

“It’s not going to cost SI even a quarter penny per unit. But the consumer will pay over two hundred dollars per unit for an imaging increase of that magnitude — when it comes out on the next full-numbered phone, not just the next one with a new letter attached to it. New letters can only increase end price maybe sixty to one hundred. End price increase per new number is two to four hundred and sells three times as many units.”

Peter pinched his nose. “That makes… You totally lost me back… I don’t even know when.”

Tony laughed. “It’s the not nice bit about being in the tech business, kid. It’s why people in Queens can never afford the latest phone even though it didn’t cost me more than a few dollars to make it.”

“Why do it then?”

“So I can say ‘turn floor thirty five into an apartment’. So I can say ‘use carbon-vibranium nanotubes’ on that thing Sam uses to pretend-fly.” Tony shrugged. “It’s necessary.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about working on that.”

“Okay. No, I mean it. I’m not being sarcastic. Pick something that doesn’t mess with your moral compass. I have no problem with you doing that. There’s plenty of work in those files. If you’re not sure about a file, I’ll tell you the truth behind the project. I don’t lie. I’m sorry to disappoint you but you gotta understand kid, my moral compass for SI was set so low that this kind of business shit? Doesn’t come close for me even though I’ve moved the bar a whole lot higher than it was before Afghanistan.”

Tony went back to work and watched out of the corner of his eye while Peter debated the ethics of the business world in his head. He must’ve come to some sort of conclusion because he went back to the phone. He pulled a good chunk of code out of the area where Tony knew the imaging processor was and settled into making, what Tony assumed was, a ‘no more than five percent’ change. A certain amount of disillusionment was to be expected as one went from wide-eyed student to working. He was certain that he would’ve eventually come up on the limits of the kid’s moral compass, but he’d always been prepared for that. He was just happy to find out that the limits weren’t so tight as to be unworkable with, like Cap’s were. Peter was human at least.

Tony sent the attachment points for the battery over to Peter’s workstation the next afternoon.

“Tony?”

“Yeah?”

The next bit didn’t come right away, but Tony was used to that.

“I got from ‘can’t’ to ‘can’.”

Tony sighed. “I’m happy for you, kid.”

“Are you…”

“Nope.”

“When?”

“Probably never, sorry.”

“Does it have to do with me?”

Tony sighed again, heavier. “Miles under the belt isn’t insulation against everything.” He really wanted not to run away again. It was getting childish. He sat there and tried to at least made it look like he was working on the projection at his table. 

“I hurt you.”

“I let myself get hurt by you. Different thing entirely.” This whole torturously slow amateur therapy business was supposed to be about Peter, not about him. “Peter, it just looks like I’ve got life figured out from the perspective of an twenty year old. There’s some stuff I can hold your hand through while you work it out, but shit about me? You’re not equipped to do the same in return, okay?”

“But…”

“You’re just not!” Running away happened again, even if it was fucking childish.

After dinner the next day, Peter put his hand on Tony’s arm before the man could start the after dinner clearing up. “I think I should probably move out.”

“You feeling better?” Tony moved his arm. “No more of that ‘risk to yourself or others’ thing?”

“It’s hard, but I can manage.”

“Okay then.” He started clearing the dishes.

Peter turned in his chair so he could see the kitchen. “What I can’t manage is the fact that you don’t trust me anymore,” he said sadly. “I believe that you were in love with me. It’s just…” Peter swallowed. “I’m getting to where I can admit that I’m in love with you. And…” He turned back around to face the dining table instead of the kitchen. “I can’t let myself do that when I know you aren’t able to trust me. If I stay longer, it’s going to get to the point where I can’t stop it.”

He got up from the table and went to stand behind Tony at the sink. He wrapped his arms around the man’s waist and rested his head between his shoulders. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

It was a movement so slight that if Peter hadn’t been resting against Tony’s back, he never would’ve noticed it. Not even with spidey-senses. A hitch in his breath that never quite reached that level.

“I had no idea…” Peter’s words broke. He sighed. He wasn’t going to lie. “That’s not true. I was… Yeah, I wanted to manipulate you.”

“Why…” Tony couldn’t ask any more of the question.

“I wanted to get what I wanted to get.” Peter moved one hand from around Tony’s waist and brought it up beside his face. His first two fingertips ran in abstract patterns over the worn knit fabric, feeling the heat of Tony’s skin beneath it. “I wanted to feel you. I wanted to avoid you saying the things I knew you wanted to say. I wanted to avoid me wanting to hear you say them. I was selfish and I was a prick. I believed…” He sighed. “Believing the others made it easier for me to pretend… that I wasn’t in love with you. I didn’t know it would hurt you. I didn’t think you _ could _be hurt.”

He kissed Tony lightly, between his shoulder blades. “I fucked up. I manipulated you. You not being able to trust me? That’s my fault. Being in love isn’t enough to fix things.” He put one more kiss over the first before slipping his other hand from around Tony’s waist and stepping back. “I’ll be staying with May until I can get my own place.”

Tony turned around and put his hands on Peter’s waist, stopping him, bringing him close again. He reached up and caressed the boy’s cheek. 

“And if you went from ‘getting to where you can admit you’re falling in love with me’ to letting yourself fall?” Tony asked.

Peter let his two fingers run along Tony’s jawline. “I can’t get from there to there without you trusting me. And I don’t deserve your trust.”

“Trust works like love. It happens whether the person deserves it or not.”

“Are you still in love with me?”

Tony brought their lips together. Their kiss was soft and open. “Yes. I’m still in love with you. Can you let yourself fall?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I can help it.” Peter wrapped his arms around Tony’s neck and kissed him. When he broke their kiss, he pulled Tony’s head down until their foreheads were touching. He licked his lips, hesitant, afraid of what he was going to say next. “Can you trust me Anthony?” Peter felt Tony’s tears fall onto his cheeks.

“Yeah. I don’t think I can help it.”

**Author's Note:**

> My Starker blog on tumblr is [starker-stories](https://starker-stories.tumblr.com/).  
Come on by and visit.


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